The topics:

• Phil is happy that Skype no longer sucks! After getting burned several times with Vonage, he tried calling into the show on Skype. And it worked great.

  Phil's opinion of Skype has varied somewhat over the years.

• We recognized Veterans Day. We thank all veterans, past and present, for their contribution to our country.

• Michael Darling, who is a veteran, then took us into a discussion on the future of dogs as pets. According to one thinker (scroll down), they will be the only acceptable pets in the future.

• Michael Crichton has died. He was a remarkable man - a prolific novelist, screenplay author, movie director, and he was a practicing medical doctor.

• Michael Darling reported that in the latest election California approved a tax hike to build a bullet train that will run between San Francisco and Las Angeles.

  Also, Missouri has approved a measure upping the amount of electricity that will have to be harvested from renewable resources.

• Astounding Science Facts:

  Astronomers have discovered a "dark flow" to the universe. Apparently huge structures outside the visible universe are pulling everything.

• Bjorn Lomborg has some interesting thoughts on global warming. He accepts the probability of global warming, but wonders whether it would be cost effective to do anything about it.

  A chat room participant also wondered whether the melting of places like Greenland will allow cultivation of new lands for food.

• Lomborg believes that advancing technology can create more cost-effective solutions to problems if we give it time to develop. He believes, for example, that solar technology is still too expensive to adopt today. He thinks that governments should wait for the technology to improve before pushing it.

  The point was made in the chat room that technology is always improving. If you waited, for example, for computers to get as good as they will ever get before buying one you'd still be waiting. Stephen pointed out that people didn't wait for computers to be perfected before buying them. Instead, the buying public waited through the 70's for computer technology to become powerful enough to do useful things. That useful point was reached in the early 80's. We started buying personal computers then and we've been buying ever more powerful computers ever since.

  Similarly, the pragmatic public has little reason to adopt solar power until its cheaper than buying electricity off the grid. When it becomes cheaper to adopt solar than to use the grid - meaning the payback period for the equipment is reasonably short - the public will begin adopting solar. Even as solar continues to be improved.

  Ray Kurzweil has called the point at which solar becomes cheaper than grid the Solar Singularity.

• Solar is being improved all the time. Just recently an anti-reflective nano coating has been developed. By cutting down reflection at all angles much more light will reach the photovoltaic cell within the unit.

• The guys didn't come to any firm conclusion about whether its better for the government to push a project or the private sector. Stephen admitted a bias for the private sector, then he stated that sometimes projects still need to be done where there's no obvious profit potential. In those situations government solutions might be appropriate.

• Our FastForward Radio schedule for the coming week will be unusual because we will be covering Convergence '08 directly from the unconference. Stay tuned for show times.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Black Lab. The song is "Remember."

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